Human Experiences, Proximity, Augmented Reality and the Internet of Things

iBeacon Hackathon: What Would You Create?

Giving yet another reason to jump on a plane to Europe, Glimworm is holding a Bluetooth LE hackathon in Amsterdam with some interesting challenges for local developers.

But why do we have to be left on the sidelines for the party? Jump into the comments below and toss your own ideas into the mix or message me on Twitter and I’ll share them with the Glimworm team.

iBeacon and Bluetooth LE Tips and Resources

In the meantime, their pre-hackathon blog post has some handy pointers for those of you new to playing with Bluetooth LE beacons and has some inspiring use cases and challenges to get your creative juices flowing.

The Glimworm team points to Two Canoes amazing Geohopper suite of apps for one of its challenges.

It involves creating an app that accomplishes 10 things, including:

Changing your iChat Status to “Out” when stepping away from a beacon

Remotely snapping a webcam photo and emailing it to yourself

Turning on a light when you arrive in the beacon zone

Make a dramatic entrance and play “Eye of the Tiger” when you come in range of a beacon

I was flattered that the team picked up on some of our UX examples from a recent post and have added a few of them to their list of challenges. In particular, I love this one:

In challenge 3 I would like to see the concept as using iBeacons as pins either in a scavenger hunt game or even better as a sort of beacon led chat room

So what would you create if you could jump on a plane to Amsterdam?

What would your use case be for a scavenger hunt? What kinds of environments would be the perfect location for a beacon-led chat room? What kinds of real world “triggers” could a beacon help perform (opening doors, closing blinds, turning the TV on?)

Maybe we can’t be there with them, but we can toss over some ideas of our own!

2 thoughts on “iBeacon Hackathon: What Would You Create?”

To get us started – I can’t get the idea out of my head about pin drops. I have this vague notion of something to do with dog parks, day care centres…places where people pop by but not for an extended period, and you leave notes for each other that you don’t necessarily want shared with the whole world. Maybe they even have an expiry and the note disappears after a few hours.

So: an iBeacon app where parents can leave notes for each other outside a local daycare or community centre?

Doug, Thanks for blogging about todays event. I am sorry I could not reply to you during the day, you have to believe me when I say it was not because I did not want to. We had more than 40 people visiting throughout the day and 5 of the 9 challenges I set ended with a demo. Since it was Saturday many people had other commitments to go to later in the afternoon so instead of having a formal round up we video’d the demos and we will put them online next week before Wednesday, which is the day we will start taking pre-orders.

The most difficult technology was triangulation. Three teams tried this but none were really successful. It seems that the signals are disturbed when going through people’s bodies and therefore as you turn around the beacon signals are affected. Do you know of anyone who has successfully triangulated so far in a realistic environment i.e. with a few people in the room?

I’d be glad to send you some pictures and footage just as soon as I get it off the camera.